Lighting designs have become increasingly complex due to the integration of daylighting, movable and fixed shading devices, occupancy sensors, addressable fixtures, and control sequences. Thus, it is becoming increasingly popular to create lighting networks.
Networked lighting systems typically comprise a set of luminaires, lighting sensors, and motion sensors, interconnected by a communication medium. The communication medium may be based on wires, radio frequency (RF) technology, or visible light communications (also known as coded light).
The interconnection between the luminaires, lighting sensors, and motion sensors enables a controlled lighting system, in which the information sensed by the sensors may be used to control the luminaires and, in particular, determine the intensity settings of these luminaires. Typically, one sensor controls one or more luminaires.
Some functionalities offered by these networked lighting systems are, for example, presence control and daylight adaptation. For presence control, luminaires, based on data sensed by motion sensors, are only switched on when at least one person is present. For daylight adaptation, luminaires, based on data sensed by light sensors, are dimmed when daylight enters the room (e.g. through the windows of the room).
The luminaires may be incorporated into the control system of the network by a commissioning process. Commissioning is the process of setting up the network by associating switches and sensors with one or more luminaires so that the luminaires can be operated individually or in groups by specific switches and sensors, with the overall network being managed by a controller.
To operatively couple the components to the control system in the commissioning process, every luminaire, switch and sensor must be assigned a unique network address for identification in order to receive, read and execute the command signals.
Commissioning also involves mapping the location of the physical components on a building plan with their unique network addresses. This is one of the key challenges of the commissioning process.
During some commissioning processes, certain components may be connected and grouped together in order to create functional groups. Luminaires assigned to a particular group are instructed to operate collectively in response to conditions, initiate particular lighting sequences and/or run particular programs.
Known commissioning techniques may be performed manually, semi-automatically or automatically. During a manual installation, a trained engineer or electrician installs the devices, then manually records the network address of each fixture on the building plan, and connects all the devices. The manual process may require the use of a ladder to access or touch the luminaire, especially for those luminaire located within a ceiling. The luminaires may be commissioned by the technician manually entering the addresses assigned to the devices into a database and defining the control functions to be implemented.
One example of a known semi-automated commissioning technique uses a test signal to cycle the power level of each light such that the luminaires flash in a random order. Then, the technician walks around searching the building attempting to locate the flashing luminaire and match it to the building plan. This process is repeated until all luminaires are identified and matched. It's especially tedious and difficult when the luminaires are located in multiple rooms or in a large building. In such situations, one technician cannot visually detect every luminaire. Thus, the commissioning of a large building or multiple rooms becomes a complex task involving numerous trained technicians. Unfortunately, data input mistakes frequently occur, which may lead to many errors during the commissioning of a large building with many floors.
Accordingly, such known techniques for commissioning luminaires can be relatively labor intensive, complex, time-consuming, expensive, and error prone.
As the number of luminaires in a building increase, the complexity of the commissioning process also increases. Thus, in more sophisticated systems, attempts have been made to automate the commissioning process by using signal sources and sensors associated with each luminaire to automatically create the functional groupings.